Restoration Comedy Quotes

If you lead me astray, then my wanderings will bring me to my destination.

A comedy that has been divide in two can never be Restored

For about a whole month, at least, whenever anybody said anything that sounded campusy or phony, or that smelled to high heaven of ego or something like that, I at least kept quiet about it. I went to the movies or I stayed in the library all hours or I started writing papers like made on Restoration Comedy and stuff like that—but at least I had the pleasure of not hearing my own voice for a while.

FALK. I feel myself like God's lost prodigal; I left Him for the world's delusive charms. With mild reproof He wooed me to His arms; And when I come, He lights the vaulted hall, Prepares a banquet for the son restored, And makes His noblest creature my reward. From this time forth I'll never leave that Light,— But stand its armed defender in the fight; Nothing shall part us, and our life shall prove A song of glory to triumphant love!

A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation.

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The ‘hand’ of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, ‘A Comedy in Chapters’, suggests the novel’s affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners.

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation. American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety... Such films did not so much teach Americans to 'stop worrying and love the bomb' as to 'keep worrying and love the state.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general command of the Roman armies, under the well-known names of PROCONSUL and IMPERATOR.5 But he would receive them only for ten years. Even before the expiration of that period, he hoped that the wounds of civil discord would be completely healed, and that the republic, restored to its pristine health and vigour, would no longer require the dangerous interposition of so extraordinary a magistrate. The memory of this comedy, repeated several times during the life of Augustus, was preserved to the last ages of the empire, by the peculiar pomp with which the perpetual monarchs of Rome always solemnized the tenth years of their reign.

Films featuring museums are on the whole, not serious ones. They are mostly comedies, mild thrillers, romances, and horror movies, with a few disaster movies and detective films. Nevertheless, they speak clearly to the popular perception of the museum: a place apart from normal, everyday life; dusty, dark, mysterious, with arcane processes being carried out by strange obsessive curators and naive restorers and scientists. Neither exhibitions nor collections in store are the focus: 'the museum' is a sort of composite of both, and its psychological depiction is of a place where surprising and extraordinary things can happen - a place with hidden depths and many secrets.

CJ's peace was restored. Momentarily. "Oh shit shit shit," a woman said. Her voice rippled with the kind of panic CJ expected from the bride today, but her husky undertones were too low for her to be any of his female relatives. Perhaps the confessional hadn't been a gift from God after all. "If that's what you need to do, but not right now, please," CJ said. Her shriek splintered his last hopes for peace. "Ohmigod!" his intruder gasped. "Not generally, but hey, if that's what you want to call me, I'm game.

The business didn't trust it, audiences didn't want it, but marriage could never be ignored. It was everywhere and nowhere, the genre that dared not speak its name, the ghost that hung over the happy ending of every romantic comedy. As a subject, it existed to be achieved (jolly comedy, great love story), destroyed (death, murder, tragedy), or denied (divorce). If it was achieved, the movie was over. If it was destroyed, it was no longer there, gotten rid of and abandoned once and for all. If it was denied, it was only temporarily shelved (for some fun) and could be reassuringly restored.

That curve is also the containing narrative shape of the Bible, because the mythical shape of the Bible, if we read it from beginning to end, is a comic one. It's a story in which man is placed in a state of nature from which he falls—the word "fall" is something which this diagram indicates visually.7 At the end of the story, he is restored to the things that he had at the beginning. Judaism focuses upon the story of Israel, which in the Old Testament is to be restored at the end of history, according to the way the prophets see that history. The Christian Bible is focused more on the story of Adam, who represents mankind as falling from a state of integration with nature into a state where he is alienated from nature. In symbolic terms, what Adam loses is the tree and the water of life. Those are images that we'll look at in more detail later. On practically the first page of the Bible we are told that Adam loses the tree and the water of life in the garden of Eden. On practically the last page of the Bible, in the last chapter of the Book of Revelation, the prophet has a vision of the tree and the water of life restored to man. That affinity between the structure of the Bible and the structure of comedy has been recognized for many centuries and is the reason why Dante called his vision of hell and purgatory and heaven a commedia.

Poets, like cudgell’d bullies, never do At first or second blow submit to you; But will provoke you still, and ne’er have done, Till you are weary first with laying on.

CASHIER: You’re aware of the side effects of an anti-amour, right? ETHAN: I’ve heard rumors. CASHIER: They’re all true. ETHAN: Wait, it actually dries up your heart? CASHIER: Partially. ETHAN: What? CASHIER: Well, this tonic works the opposite way a regular one does. Instead of restoring, it destroys. When the anti-amour goes in to “cure” you, it kills a part of your heart in the process. Then there’s the other tradeoff. ETHAN: Which is? CASHIER: The pain will go away, but you’ll find it difficult to love as easily or strongly in the future. That leads to a new kind of pain, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. ETHAN: I don’t think it could be any worse than what I’m feeling right now. CASHIER: That’s what I said before I took it.

Scout.’ ‘Yes, boss. Off we go. To infinity and beyond!’ He was a good driver, good enough almost for her to relax. Almost. So, elderly aunt here we come, ready or not, Louise thought. The impostor aunt. The farce had grown more farcical. Except it wasn’t funny, but then farces rarely were in Louise’s opinion, she was drawn more to revenge tragedies. Patrick, surprisingly (or perhaps not), liked Restoration comedy. And Wagner. Should you marry a man who liked Wagner?

A huge meringue with polio who drives everywhere in a beautifully restored Hillman Imp.

The very implausibility of the restoration of pared down fingernails and amputated limbs at the end of time underlines, for me, the despicableness of human beings who, in fact, torture and mutilate their fellow human beings. Yet, the implausible, even risible doctrine of the resurrection of the body asserts that—if there is such a thing as redemption—it must redeem our experience of enduring and even inflicting such acts. If there is meaning to the history we tell and the corruption (both moral and physical) we suffer, surely it is in (as well as in spite of) fragmentation. Bodily resurrection at the end of time is, in a technical sense, a comic—that is, a contrived and brave—happy ending.

This raises some very basic, very deep questions about how comedy (if not all of culture) continues, if the levels of trust and context they once depended on are impossible to restore.